


Just Take Me One Time Around the Ballroom Slow

by hannasus



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Second Chances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 04:38:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1731410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hannasus/pseuds/hannasus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three hundred forty-five days. That’s how long it took Howard Stark to locate the <i>Valkyrie </i>crash site in the East Canada Arctic basin. </p><p>Peggy’s face is the first thing you see when you regain consciousness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Take Me One Time Around the Ballroom Slow

Three hundred forty-five days. That’s how long it took Howard Stark to locate the _Valkyrie_ crash site in the East Canada Arctic basin. 

Peggy’s face is the first thing you see when you regain consciousness. She’s out of uniform and her hair is longer and you’ve never seen anything more beautiful than the tearful smile she gives you. The docs say you were asleep, but it doesn’t feel like sleep. It feels like you closed your eyes for a second and when you opened them again it was a whole year later and the war was over. 

Peggy sits by your bedside and tells you about President Roosevelt’s death and how Senator Truman is the American president now. She tells you about VE-Day and the crowds of Londoners who formed a conga line and danced down the middle of Piccadilly Circus. And then she tells you about the bombs America dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and holds your hand while you cry for all the lives lost, and for all those that were saved by this terrible, unforgivable act. 

A lot can happen in a year, apparently. 

Gabe Jones is married with a kid on the way. Falsworth is back in England working for MI6 and Dernier is in Paris helping the provisional government. Morita signed up with the Military Intelligence Service and Dugan is working for Stark out in California. 

In your absence the Howling Commandos have all moved on with their lives. They’ve left you behind and it hurts more than you want to admit. To everyone else Bucky’s death is just a fading memory, but to you it’s still raw and recent. You keep thinking of things you want to tell him and then you remember that your best friend is gone forever and it hurts like new all over again.

It’s tough getting used to civilian life again, but you’re too special to be broken so you try to act like everything’s fine. You don’t tell anyone that it feels like part of you was left behind in the wreckage. Like patches of your skin are still rimed with ice. When you manage to sleep at all you dream of falling—sometimes you’re the one falling and sometimes it’s Bucky—and when you wake you can’t remember what it feels like to have solid ground beneath your feet.

Peggy is the only one who seems to notice. Everyone else accepts your brittle smiles at face value but she sees right through you, sees the panic scrabbling beneath the surface of the hero facade. She refuses to take “I’m fine” for an answer, refuses to leave you alone until finally you admit that maybe you’re not doing so great after all. 

“I’m don’t know who I’m supposed to be now that the war is over,” you tell her. “I don’t remember how to be a man without a mission.”

She listens to your wallowing with a sympathetic ear and then tells you to get off your rump and do something about it. “You’re strong enough to get through this,” she says with enough confidence for the both of you. “That kid who got beaten up in every alley in Brooklyn because he refused to run away from a fight wouldn’t let something like this break him, and neither will you.” 

When Colonel Phillips asks you to come back to work for the Strategic Science Reserve you say yes. You’re a better soldier than a spy, but at least you’ve got a mission again. War is war even when it’s not called a war, and there are always more enemies to fight, as it turns out. There’s something almost comforting about that, but also something ugly and shameful.

The SSR turns into SHIELD at some point but nothing’s really different except the name. The best missions are the ones where you get to work with Peggy, but even when you’re not working together you manage to see a lot of each other. The two of you sign up for beginner dance lessons at Arthur Murray and like it so much you move on to Latin dance. You take her to the pictures to see “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the Ziegfeld Theatre to see “Showboat” and the Downbeat Club to hear Ella Fitzgerald. You teach her how to cook as well as you do (which is not all that well) and she teaches you how to shoot as well as she does (which is extremely well). 

You nearly end up quitting SHIELD over Operation Paperclip. You’re repulsed by the prospect of turning war criminals into allies, and you’ll be damned if you’re going to work with Arnim Zola—the man you hold responsible for Bucky’s death. Colonel Phillips accuses you of letting your emotions get the better of you, but you refuse to back down. 

“I won’t be a party to this,” you tell him, shaking with suppressed rage. “It’s a bad idea, it’s dangerous, but more than that it’s just wrong. If you go through with this I will walk away from this organization and never come back.” 

Peggy takes your side and after some convincing so does Howard. Phillips is forced to shut down the program and Zola stays in Spandau Prison where he belongs. He dies there a few years later.

In April of 1948—two years after you were pulled out of the ice—you take Peggy to the top of the Empire State Building, get down on one knee, and ask her to marry you. You can’t quite believe your luck when she actually says yes. 

All the old Howling Commandos show up for the wedding and serenade you with “Peg O’ My Heart” while you twirl your new bride around the dance floor like Fred Astaire. After a honeymoon in the Poconos you carry Peggy over the threshold of your new home, just a few blocks from Prospect Park. “I love you,” you tell her over and over again, in every way you know how. 

You talk about having children. You want to start a family with her more than anything, but you’re worried about what the serum in your blood might do to your kids—or to her. She admits that she doesn’t know what the risks are. Erskine never thought that far ahead, or if he did, he never said anything about it to her. SHIELD has scientists who might be able to help you figure it out, but you can’t stand the idea of inviting SHIELD into something this personal, something that’s supposed to just be between you and Peggy. 

You decide to adopt. First a girl—named Sarah Rose after both of your mothers—and then a boy you name James Buchanan Rogers. You don’t get to spend as much time with the kids as you’d like—the Cold War is keeping SHIELD busy and there’s always some new crisis to go rushing off to—but you do the best you can and try to make the times you are with them count. 

The Soviets seem to have created a Super Soldier of their own, or something like it. The intel is hazy but people have taken to calling him the Winter Soldier. You feel a personal responsibility to stop the guy for reasons you can’t quite define, but the Winter Soldier isn’t that easy to catch. He manages to elude you in Manchuria and then again in Hungary. 

In 1963 you foil the Winter Soldier’s attempt to assassinate President Kennedy in Dallas and come _this close_ to capturing him before he slips away again. SHIELD tracks him to a freighter bound for Cuba but during the infiltration a fire starts in the engine room which ends up blowing the whole ship to smithereens. You lose three members of your strike team and barely get out in time yourself. No one knows whether the Winter Soldier escaped until his body is recovered from the wreckage. The metal prosthetic arm makes him easy enough to identify, but the remains are too charred to match to a name. Whoever he was, he can’t hurt anyone anymore and that’s what matters.

You worry about the fact that you doesn’t seem to be aging as fast as everyone else. Peggy’s hair is turning gray before your eyes and the laugh lines around her mouth grow deeper every year. Your greatest fear is watching everyone you love grow old and wither away while you remain unchanged. You’re terrified of being left behind again. 

You’re actually relieved when you finally find your very first gray hair—at the ripe old age of fifty—because it means you are aging after all. Even Howard’s finally starting to show some signs of maturity by then. He’s given up the endless string of pin-up girls he usually brings around in favor of a classy gal named Maria. Peggy thinks they’re bound for the altar but you have trouble picturing Howard Stark as a family man.

You’re having problems of your own on that front. You feel detached from your kids and you don’t know when it started or how to undo it. Jimmy doesn’t want to go to baseball games with you or play catch anymore. “Baseball’s boring,” he says, and it breaks your heart more than it probably should. 

Sarah’s turned into a person you don’t even recognize. She’s all about rock ’n’ roll music and peace marches and scruffy-looking boys with long hair and hooded eyes whose intentions you mistrust. Everything she says to you is punctuated by an impatient eye roll or a dramatic sigh, like it’s a hardship just to be in the same room with you.

There was a time, not so long ago, when your kids would throw themselves into your arms every time you walked through the door. Now they won’t even look you in the eye. You try to recall the feel of their pudgy fingers around your neck and their sticky kisses all over your face, but the memories drift away from you like puffs of cigarette smoke.

You can tell you’re getting older because nostalgia is becoming your favorite pastime. You find yourself missing things you never even liked in the first place, like automats and punchboards and chipped beef on toast. The world is changing around you, so fast you can barely keep up, and it makes you feels small and insignificant. 

Peggy laughs when you try to explain it to her. “Oh, my dear,” she says, threading her fingers through your hair, “only think how dull the ride the would be if it never left the station.” 

She makes you chipped beef on toast for dinner that night—she’s right, of course, it’s so much worse than you remember—and the two of you giggle like a couple of teenagers while the kids complain about how awful it is.

In 1970 you watch the news coverage of the Kent State shootings. Unarmed college students gunned down by soldiers with the American flag on their uniforms. You feel hollow, like someone reached into your chest and scooped everything out. Sarah’s starting college in the fall. It could have been her at that demonstration. It might be the next time.

“Is this what we’ve been fighting for?” you ask Peggy. Her arms are crossed, her hands clutching her elbows, pulling them tight across her chest. She doesn’t answer, only shakes her head, tears in her eyes, because there’s nothing she can say that will make this better. 

You think about all the blood on your hands that you’ll never be able to scrub off and wonder when you stopped being able to cry for the atrocities committed in the name of the Stars and Stripes on your chest. There’s a bitter taste in the back of your throat when you report for duty the next day, but you report for duty nonetheless because you fight for what you love. You’re a weapon but you’re also a shield and you won’t make the world a better place by staying home.

When Howard and Maria's son is born they ask you and Peggy to be the godparents. You watch Howard awkwardly trying to cradle the squirming, red-faced infant and you realize this is probably the first thing Howard Stark has ever failed to excel at naturally. 

“He’s such a tiny, helpless thing,” Howard grumbles. “Why am I so damned terrified?”

“Because now you’ve got something to lose,” you tell him, and demonstrate how to bounce the baby gently so that he smiles instead of fusses.

Sarah is accepted to the MD-PhD program at Johns Hopkins and you’re pretty sure your little girl is going to cure cancer one day. Jimmy has slightly less focus than his sister and more of an artistic bent. After college he spends some time drifting from job to job and you're relieved when he finally seems to settle into a teaching career.

You walk Sarah down the aisle on her wedding day, tears in your eyes and your mother’s handkerchief tucked into the bride’s bouquet. You and Peggy welcome your first grandchild a few years later and your second a few years after that. It makes you feel old but it also makes you feel alive, like you’re part of something bigger than yourself.

Jimmy isn’t married and you’ve accepted that he never will be. He’s been living with the same roommate for a few years now and it’s obvious that they’re more than roommates but you don’t push, you just hope that he’ll feel like he can tell you one day when he’s ready. 

The Vietnam War finally comes to an end after twenty bloody years, but then there’s Afghanistan and Angola and Iran and Yugoslavia because war never stops, it just moves on to someplace else. There’s no end to the things people will choose to kill each other over. It’s a lesson you’ve learned the hard way, that’s written in scars that don’t show up on your skin, but you don’t know how to be anything other than what you are at this point.

There’s an energy crisis and a recession and famine in Africa and a hole in the ozone layer and you spend most of the ’80s terrified Jimmy’s going to get sick but it’s Peggy who gets sick instead. The doctors do a biopsy and then a lumpectomy and you hold her hair back when the chemo makes her retch until there’s no more hair to hold back. 

You’ve run headlong into danger, faced off with madmen and mass murderers, looked death in the eye a hundred times without flinching, but you’ve never known fear like this. It makes your legs weak and your bowels loose. You get down on your knees every night and beg God to spare Peggy and God must be listening because she gets better. Her strength comes back and her hair grows back and you hold each other even tighter because now you both know how easily the things that matter most can slip away from you.

You haven’t gone into the field for a while—you’re in your seventies now, after all, even if you’re still surprisingly spry for a septuagenarian—but after Peggy’s scare you start cutting back your hours at SHIELD. Part of it is a sense of the stopwatch winding down, of wanting to spend more time with her in the time you have left. But if you’re honest your heart has started to go out of the work. You fought the Red Menace for forty years and when the Berlin Wall finally came down the only thing that changed was that we started calling our enemies terrorists instead of Communists. 

Suddenly everything’s about the internet and it’s the 21st century and a new millennium, a page on the calendar you never thought you’d live to see. You’re at the Triskelion the morning the Twin Towers come down and it’s a shock and it’s _deja vu_ all at the same time. Everyone’s running around asking why they didn’t see it coming but all you can think about is the fourth plane, the one that went down in Pennsylvania. It’s a reminder that the world is full of heroes and they don’t all need a uniform or super powers to make a difference. 

You and Peggy work in the garden together in the mornings. You cook dinner together in the evenings. You take vacations—real vacations, that aren’t interrupted by intelligence gathering operations or _coups d’etat_ or attempted assassinations. You lie on beaches and wander through museums and sip coffee in cozy little cafes. You take long walks hand in hand and if you start to feel guilty for spending so much time away from SHIELD all you have to do is wait a few minutes and the feeling goes away. 

You still do the odd public appearance and show up for most of the weekly security briefings, but you recognizes fewer and fewer faces in the halls these days. The torch has been passed on to younger agents and you’re more or less at peace with that. 

One evening in May you and Peggy are sitting side-by-side in the back porch swing, watching the sunset through the sycamores. You’ve got your arm around her narrow frame and her head is resting on your shoulder. Her hair is solid silver now, but still as long and beautiful as it was in 1946, and it smells of the fresh-baked bread cooling on the kitchen counter inside. 

“I guess we’ve done pretty well for ourselves,” you say, caught up in warm-sweet memories of the life you’ve made together. 

“Don’t go getting maudlin on me now,” she says with a faint huff of amusement.

She presses closer and you turn your head to look at her, your hand reaching up to brush the hair out of her face and trace the curve of her cheek. The wind is scented with lilacs and Peggy’s skin is soft under your fingertips and you open your mouth to tell her you love her—

And that’s when the phone starts ringing. 

You feel a sudden chill, despite the warmth of the evening air. 

“You should answer the phone,” Peggy says.

“I don’t want to,” you say, though you’re not sure why. “I’d rather stay here with you.”

“You can’t just let it ring.”

“They’ll call back if it’s important.”

She shakes her head. “You have to answer the phone, my darling.”

“Kiss me first.”

She nods and your palm skims along her jaw, drawing her towards you. Your lips meet hers. You close your eyes—

 

Steve Rogers opened his eyes. He was lying in bed in his D.C. apartment. Alone. 

His cellphone was ringing on the nightstand. The old-fashioned rotary telephone ringtone he’d once been so pleased to discover was jarring and shrill in the pre-dawn quiet. 

He fumbled for the phone and frowned at the name on the display. He could only think of one reason why Agent Carter would be calling him this time of morning. 

He took a breath to steady himself before touching the green button on the display. “Sharon?” 

“Captain Rogers, I’m sorry to call so early.” There was a rawness to the businesslike clip of her voice. As if she’d been crying recently. 

He closed his eyes. “Tell me.”

“Aunt Peggy passed away a few hours ago. I’m so sorry.”

He laid his head back on the bed, phone still pressed to his ear. A garbage truck rumbled outside. The hollow chatter of his upstairs neighbors drifted down through the ceiling as they started getting ready for work. Grief settled on him like ten tons of solid lead on his chest. It was hard to get enough air in his lungs. 

He’d known this was coming, of course he did, and in so many ways it was blessing. She was ninety-five years old, she’d lived a good, long life. And she hadn’t been herself for months. 

None of that was even slightly comforting. 

The world was an emptier place without Peggy in it. She was the last person alive who’d known him before the serum. Who knew who he really was underneath the uniform. She was the only woman he’d ever loved. And now she’d gone and left him behind. 

“Steve?” he heard Sharon say on the other end of the line. “Steve, are you still there?”

He opened his eyes. “Yeah. I’m still here.”


End file.
